{"id":187,"date":"2012-11-05T22:07:19","date_gmt":"2012-11-06T03:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/?p=187"},"modified":"2012-11-05T22:07:19","modified_gmt":"2012-11-06T03:07:19","slug":"cdrwin-vigilantism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/2012\/11\/05\/cdrwin-vigilantism\/","title":{"rendered":"CDRWin Vigilantism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Something that I have been wanting to complain about for a long time is CDRWin from Golden Hawk. Back in the days when CDs were still common (and most piracy was with CDs), burning CD images to blank CDs was a task that some people did often. There were plenty of programs and image formats, but CDRWin was a popular one that worked fairly well, at least that is, until version 4.0.<\/p>\n<p>To deter piracy (which is of course a Sisyphean endeavor), Golden Hawk chose not to increase the complexity of their licensing system, but rather, to play vigilante and sabotage users\u2019 system when they <em>suspected<\/em> an attempt at piracy.<\/p>\n<p>What happened was CDRWin basically had three modes of operation:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Unregistered\/evaluation<\/li>\n<li>Registered<\/li>\n<li><strong>Vigilante<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When you enter a serial-number\/key to register CDRWin, if the key is invalid, then it will complain and remain in evaluation mode. However, if the key is valid, then it may accept the key and say thank you and display a <em>Registered<\/em> stamp in the titlebar and <em>About<\/em> dialog, but secretly be in vigilante mode whereby it <strong>pretends<\/strong> to be registered and appears to be in all manner, except that whenever you burn a disc, it corrupts it, resulting in a \u201ccoaster\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>This is unacceptable for several reasons<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The method that it uses to detect if the key was created using a \u201ckey generator\u201d instead of from Golden Hawk themselves seems to be flawed because legitimate customers were incorrectly affected.<\/li>\n<li>The\u00a0surreptitious nature of the anti-piracy tactic (it gives not warning whatsoever) prevented identifying the problem and made it look like the software is simply buggy, thus damaging the developer\u2019s general reputation (imagine that, reviews from pirates having a big impact on sales!)<\/li>\n<li>This is essentially vigilante behavior, not anti-piracy techniques. If vigilantism is illegal in the real world, why would it be acceptable in the digital one?<\/li>\n<li>The sabotage it does is actively harmful to the user. By corrupting (apparently <em>all<\/em>)\u00a0discs that are burned with the software, they are causing the user to have to throw them out because they are now useless. Would it be any more acceptable if the software were designed to fry a user\u2019s CPU, burn out their monitor, or print hundreds of pages of solid black\/color with their printer to waste their ink cartridges? Of course not! Wasting blank CDs isn\u2019t any more acceptable.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<div class=\"tagcloud\"><a href=\"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/tag\/copy-protection\/\" rel=\"tag\">Copy-Protection<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/tag\/crime\/\" rel=\"tag\">Crime<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/tag\/software\/\" rel=\"tag\">Software<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something that I have been wanting to complain about for a long time is CDRWin from Golden Hawk. Back in the days when CDs were still common (and most piracy was with CDs), burning CD images to blank CDs was a task that some people did often. There were plenty of programs and image formats, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,59,27],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-copy-protection","tag-crime","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synetech.ddns.net\/blogs\/rantinions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}